Clarification
You do not have to worry about your mastodon.social (m.s) account being defederated.
There is a well meaning, but misleading post currently promoted that suggests you should move your m.s account because:
1) "Instance admins are considering defederating them"
2) "Their admin is making spam accounts easier to create."
Very few, if any, instances are considering blocking m.s, and the recent spam attacks are worthy of sober discussion, not hyperbole. [more]
So what is going on? Recently mastodon.social (m.s) has been the target of crypto spam attacks. Attackers have joined m.s and started to post many irrelevant crypto related posts. Moderators on m.s have tracked down these bad actors and isolated them, but some sneak through while the moderation effort tracks them down. It has been dealt with pretty swiftly.
Also happening recently, Eugen Rochko @Gargron, the developer of Mastodon changed the sign up process, ostensibly to make it simpler, such that people now are funneled onto mastodon.social (m.s) unless they select a different instance. This has been the source of some concern that m.s will be oversubscribed and be vulnerable to hacker attacks, as well as performance issues. Some regard the concentration at m.s as anti-Fediverse in principle.
@Gargron People point to the issue of "too big to defederate" as a reason that large instances like m.s are a bad thing. The logic goes that if bad actors are left unchecked then other instances can not simple defederate m.s because that would block too many other accounts. It is certainly true that it is not really possible to defederate a very large instance so large instances have a big responsibility to police themselves.
@Gargron Smaller instances always have the threat of defederation as motivation for doing a good job of moderating their users, but bad actors piling on a smaller instance happens too as we have seen in numerous attacks. Simply defederating that instance without any means of re-federation would disenfranchise all those users, so that's another issue that needs our attention.
@mastodonmigration @Gargron did I read that correctly? If an instance defederates another it *can't* re-federate with it in the future?
Hopefully it's my reading comprehension failure
@pixelpusher220 @Gargron No that is certainly not the case. However, in practice, once your instance gets on a ban list it may be difficult to get it removed from the list.
What is being said is that moderation in a federated environment is not simple and that there are multiple aspects which need to be successfully coordinated to keep our communities safe from both outside attack and unwanted isolation of normal users.
ok, whew :) Perhaps there's no 'built in' process for it but it's possible. Yes would be more difficult as it's likely a direct convo between admins to figure it out.
What might be useful is the 'mute for 1/3/7 days' type option we have for individual account interactions instead a complete block. Or maybe even a 'only allow people you directly follow' type thing to let the other instance get the issue under control before more dire measures.
Mastodon Migration
Pusher Of Pixels (old account)